In recent years, it is becoming increasingly common to connect various home electronic devices via wired or wireless connections. Establishing communication between the electronic devices, allows the electronic devices to exchange information therebetween and to control one another. This allows the electronic devices to be used in unprecedented form.
For example, by wirelessly connecting a display and a tuner, it is made possible to establish a television receiving system by which the display is freely mobile within a range in which the display can communicate with the tuner.
In this system, it is also possible to connect the tuner to a LAN so as to establish a connection in which the display and the tuner can communicate via the LAN. This allows, with control of the tuner, an image or the like, which has been transmitted from another device that is connected to the LAN, to be transmitted to the display via the LAN and then displayed. It is also possible to, for example, to use the Internet on the display with the use of a broadband router connected to the LAN.
Note that, in a case where the communication between electronic devices are to be established, there arises a need to set up the communication establishment. Naturally, different settings are required for different communication paths. According to the example above, therefore, such a setting is necessary that, when a switch is to be made from wireless communication to LAN communication, the tuner, out of all the devices connected to the LAN, is selected and specified as a connection destination. Such a setting process is troublesome to many users, and can involve considerable difficulties.
Therefore, it is one of the major challenges of electronic devices with communication functions to figure out how to simplify such a process of setting the communication establishment. The following Patent Literature 1 is an example of technologies for simplifying the process of setting the communication establishment.
Specifically, Patent Literature 1 discloses a configuration in which (i) an access point device and a client device each store a common setting information generating key therein and (ii) the client device identifies the access point device by use of the common setting information generating key. This configuration liberates a user from such a process of manually identifying the access point device to connect to, and thus makes it easy to set communication establishment.